How To Get A Lower $CPC (Cost Per Click) On Your Facebook Advertising

Paid Facebook Advertising is becoming a very interesting way for a band to get the word out there.

TheRealMusician Recommends:

If you want to take marketing your music to another level, then I can't recommend enough John Oszajca's music marketing manifesto. My favorite aspect of his complete program was his stance on email marketing, where he really leverages the that "1000 true fans" philosophy.

His website is a bit hokey (Flaming guitars? Seriously?), but his program really shows independant artists how to get a leg-up on signed artists.

But with the competition rising and rising, the cost per click (CPC) is becoming increasingly high.

Without
the proper strategies in place for you to get your cost down, you'll
find that you will blow through your budget quicker than ever.

Read on to learn how you can use Facebook Advertising for cheaper than you ever thought possible!

CTR (Click-Through-Rate) Is The Key Factor!

Getting a high Click Through Rate (CTR) is the most important part of
getting a lower CPC for your Facebook Advertising Campaigns.

It
shows Facebook Advertising that you are a quality advertising, and that
your ads are actually improving the each users experience, not taking
away from it.

When more people click on your ads, that means that you are an interesting advertiser and you have a lot to offer.

The
Facebook Advertising platform wants to reward you for being an
interesting, high-quality advertiser, by allowing you to pay less for
your advertising.

Pretending to be interesting doesn't count.

So here's how CTR works:

Say 100 people see your ad, but only 1 person actually clicks on your ad.

That means you have 100 impressions (Times your ad was shown), and 1 Click (Times your ad was clicked on).

You have a 1% CTR. That is because 1% of the people who saw your ad actually clicked it.

So if 1000 people saw your ad, and one person clicked, that means you would have a 0.10% CTR.

Hopefully
that makes sense to you? All you really have to do to figure out CTR is
Divide the Clicks by the Impressions, then move the decimal 2 places to
the right.

So…

1/1000 = 0.001

Move it two places to the right.

0.10%!

It's a pretty simple formula.

In any case, you'll be wanting to aim for any CTR higher than 0.10% on the Facebook advertising platform.

So as long as 1 person clicks for every 1000 times your ad is shown, you are doing a good job on your Facebook advertising.

The next question obviously is: "How do I achieve a high CTR?"

Here's how!

Bid High At First (Gain A Good Position)

When you create your ads, the Facebook advertising platform will have a "suggested bid" that you should use.

What happens with this bid, is it will compare your bid (And other
Factors) with other advertisers. Whoever wins the bid (like an auction)
will get the best position on the page.

And the better position that you have on the page, the higher chance you will have that someone clicks on your ad.

This
is important; remember we are trying to get a high CTR, right? So any
action you take that will increase the likelihood that someone clicks is
a good action.

I realize that it is tempting to just shove in a
low bid in hopes that you will pay less, but I highly recommend that you
place a bid at least 2 cents higher than the Facebook advertising
platforms' minimum bid.

So if Facebook suggests that you bid "$0.49 - $0.72", I recommend you bid at least $0.51 or higher.

If you keep a high CTR (Higher than 0.10%), you will see that the amount that you actually pay will likely be much, much lower than your initial bid (I've seen people pay as low as $0.01 for their clicks).

Build 10 Ads (And Tweak Them Every Week!)

What you will start to find very quickly, is that the same people will see your ad over and over again.

It
is likely that a single person in your target market will probably see
your ad a minimum of 50 times if you are advertising with even a modest
budget (More than $5 a day).

What eventually happens, is
they start to get used to your ad. In fact, it might even get to a point
where they are sick of seeing the same ad, over and over and over
again.

This is called "Ad Saturation", and it happens when people see the same ad too many times.

Aka...

How do you know that you are experiencing Ad Saturation? You will
start to see your once previously high CTR drop lower, and lower.

You may have had an ad that gave you a 0.15% CTR, but after a week or two you might find that you now only have a 0.05% CTR.

As well, some different ad text might encourage a previously unresponsive visitor into taking advantage of your ad, and taking a look at your band (Or whatever you happen to be advertising)

Bottom line?

Create New Ads Once Your CTR Drops Under 0.10%.

As a bit of extra info, the longer Facebook is around, and the more people see ads, people increasingly become blind to ads. So the 0.10% that I've written may turn into 0.8%, or even less. These numbers are open to human judgement, so don't allow yourself to be completely numbers based.

CTR not only depends on your ad, but your niche as well. Even different genres of music will have a different CTR based on the responsiveness of that genre's audience (ie. fans of Underground Metal artists will be much less receptive to ads than Top 40 Pop artists fans).

Finely Target Your Campaigns

The last step you can take to help increase your CTR (At least the last step I'll be covering in this article) is to fiddle with the targeting on your campaigns.

As of this time, you have options to change the targeting on:

Age

Gender

Location

Keyword

Connections

Relationship Status

Birthday

Education Level

Workplace

Language

Interests

Now targeting is far too broad of a subject for me to fully explore in a single article (Maybe I'll have to do a series on it some day), but I'll give you an example as to how narrowing your targeting can increase your CTR (And lower your CPC).

Just
for the example's purposes (I'll use a bit skewed numbers here), say
that you take a city like Vancouver which has about 1,000,000 people in
it.

Let's just pretend that they all use Facebook for the time being.

Let's pretend that this isn't a gigantic problem Ninja problem too; we already do it for the homeless!

And lets pretend that for every person we target, they will each see the ad 100 times (100 Impressions).

Now let's say you are a metal band, and there is the potential for 5,000 metal fans to click on your Facebook ad.

If
you are targeting all million people in Vancouver, we know perfectly
well that not all of them are metal fans, so you are going to be showing
your ad to a lot of people who simply are not interested in your band.

To do the math here:

1,000,000 PEOPLETimes100 impressions = 100,000,000 Impressions

5,000 ClicksDivided by100,000,000 Impressions = 0.005% CTR

Now that is a really low CTR.

But
let's say that we narrow the targeting. So instead of targeting all 1
million people in Vancouver, let's just target 20,000 people who have
listed "Metal" as their interested.

So lets do that calculation again:

20,000 PEOPLETimes100 impressions = 2,000,000 Impressions

5,000 ClicksDivided by2,000,000 Impressions = 0.25% CTR

Now that is a MUCH higher CTR, something that you can actually work with!

Now
I realize that I've used really extreme examples here, but I just need
to make the point to you that you can really affect your CTR by using
targeting effectively.

You can take a look and test with all the different targeting options to see if you can achieve a really high CTR.

Narrowing down your audience is the most important part here!

Perhaps
you do some testing, and you find out that people click the most on
your ad during the evenings? Well then you can set your targeting to
only display during the evenings, and that way you raise your CTR a bit.

Just testing out different options is the best way to find out what works.

Overall,
if you try each of the above tips you should be able to raise your CTR,
and pay much less for your Facebook advertising than most other people.

Having
a little know-how makes online advertising affordable for anyone with a
music career, even ones with the most modest budget.